Introduction

Over the last twenty years or so, each of the world's three leading economies - namely the United States, the European Community and China - have separately courted the GCC to enter into negotiations for the creation of free trade agreements (FTAs).

In each case the initiating discussions have faltered and stalled because of a broad range of fundamental points of disagreement. The European Community discussions - the longest-standing – appeared to have faltered because of the EU's insistence in including subject matter which to the GCC members fell way outside trade issues. The EU-GCC negotiations, although revived, appear to have made little progress, and seem the least likely to come into successful fruition in the immediate term. The US strategy under President George W. Bush to establish a comprehensive GCC agreement through individual Gulf state agreements stalled after the Bahrain and Oman free trade agreements were concluded, partly because of opposition to the two agreements from the other GCC member states. China, on the other hand, has been a relatively newcomer to GCC FTA initiatives.

In 2004 the GCC and China signed a trade and economic cooperation agreement as a precursor to a comprehensive free trade agreement between the two entities. Preliminary discussions on a free trade agreement followed, but were halted in 2009. At the time of the cessation of negotiations, the issue of intellectual property rights had not appeared on the negotiating agenda. However, these discussions have recently been revived and the agenda and working program for re-established. The proposed China-GCC FTA negotiation agenda covers trade in goods and services, investment, and economic and technical cooperation. Intellectual property issues could rank highly in a number of these broad areas.

This chapter considers the intellectual property issues that may be central to negotiations between the GCC and China negotiators and speculates on the extent and nature of the intellectual property provisions, including (speculatively) the:

• - nature of intellectual property rights to be protected under the proposed FTA and their accompanying rights and obligations;

• - specification of those rights, that is, whether they are limited to aspirational expression of principles or they are stipulations in detail;

• - obligations of the Parties and how they might be stipulated;

• - extent to which the international treaties concerning IP rights may be are joined to the FTA or whether further obligations beyond the treaties will be required.